Friday October 12, 2007

LITTLE MISS CAN'T BE WRONG. John Derbyshire starts a weak National Review thread about how modern art is bullshit, and how brave he is to say so. As usual, Richard Brookhiser feebly offers resistance.

This tedious reminder of their Philistine leanings yields one blessing: acquaintance with a new culture warrior, one E.M. Zanotti, who contributes:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it, then Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the beginnings of the interpretive approach to art. Modernism and post-modernism are the results of decades of hanging on to the idea that the standard of beauty is subjective and based on one's own vision of the world combined with a message about the rejection of anything eternal. Somewhere along the way, it became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness and open the minds of those who viewed it to new and wondrous avenues of thought (like contemporary art)...and what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck. I suppose some might argue that that, in itself, goes toward proving that art is consciously fraudulent. Rothko and Warhol and others that recognized that art has a patently commercial aspect to it might just agree...

To condense: first came forced perspective, which was wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints, which was very wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints that didn't look like photographs, which was double-plus wicked, and then, fifty years before Theodore Roszak, a "counter-culture" of jokers and bicycle wheels, which ruined everything by increasing the artist's paycheck.

That's some tasty culture warring! You can find more at Ms. Zanotti's website. Among the choicer bits: rage at rock t-shirts with Arabic logos ("Sid Vicious might return as a zombie just to protest this"); rage at Bruce Springsteen ("What does seem funny, though, is that Springsteen has actively campaigned for people who support more government, not less"); rage at a female passenger who showed modest cleavage on an airplaine ("Nobody said we have to tolerate stupidity"), which morphs into rage at Britney Spears ("Nobody on Monday was complaining that the mother of two children was writhing around on a stage"), then into rage at the "porn culture" ("As we grew steadily more individualistic after the social revolutions of the sixites..."); and rage at some Hollywood movie ("Ironically, Italy is far closer to the Middle East than America has ever been").

Actually, having panned through three months' worth of her tripe, I can tell you unequivocally Ms. Zanotti is an idiot, which explains her inclusion on the National Review culture-cop roster. Look for her negative review of some movie with boobs or bad soldiers soon!